About

“Call Me Maybe” is a 2011 dance pop single recorded by Canadian singer-songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen. The song rose to fame online after being endorsed by pop star Justin Bieber in December 2011. Since its release, the song has inspired many lip dub tributes, parodies and covers on the video sharing site YouTube.

Origin

Carly Rae Jepsen’s lead single track “Call Me Maybe” from her first EP album Curiousity was released in Canada on September 20th, 2011. The upbeat dance-pop song was written and produced by Jepsen, Josh Ramsay and Tavish Crowe and distributed by 604 Records. On December 30th, 2011, the song soared gained international attention after being tweeted by fellow Canadian pop star Justin Bieber.

Since its release, Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” has become notable for its international success, reaching number one in Australia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as peaking in the top three singles in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The music video for the song was uploaded to the singer’s YouTube VEVO channel on March 1st, 2012.

Spread

On February 18th, 2012, a lip dub music video tribute to “Call Me Maybe” was uploaded to YouTube featuring teen celebrities Selena Gomez, Ashley Tisdale and Justin Bieber. The video accumulated more than 39 million views and 150,000 comments within three months.

On March 9th, the entertainment news blog Gawker[3] published an article titled “Have You Heard ‘Call Me Maybe,’ the New Perfect Pop Song?”, which described the celebrity lip dub as “flawless.” On March 12th, AOL[4] published an interview with Jepsen, who credited much of song’s success to Justin Bieber’s promotion.

“Not too long after that, we were informed by my label, 604, that [Justin] and his manager [Scooter Braun] had actually approached them and asked if we’d be interested in combining forces and spreading the music outside of Canada.”

On March 16th, The New York Times[5] wrote about Carly Rae Jepsen’s song in an article titled “Small-Town Sentiments, Bass From the World Over”, calling Jepsen a “sassier Michelle Branch.” On March 23rd, the entertainment blog Vulture[6] posted an article about the song, focusing on Justin Bieber’s involvement in its success. As of April 27th, 2012, the song ranks at #7 on the United States Billboard Hot 100[1] and a Facebook[2] page for “Call Me Maybe- Carly Rae Jepsen” has received over 12,200 likes.

Notable Examples

The song generated many parodies, covers and additional lip dubs on YouTube. As of April 27th, 2012, there are 22,500 YouTube search results for the keywords “call me maybe.”

Celebrity Lib Dubs

On April 16th, 2012, a lip dub video featuring Katy Perry with several of her friends was uploaded to YouTube (shown top row, left) and received over 680,000 views within 11 days. On the next day, James Franco uploaded a video of himself singing along to the song in the backseat of a car (shown bottom row, right). In the following months, a wide range of singers, actors and public figures participated in the lip dub phenomenon.

On May 6th, the Harvard Baseball Team posted a video of their lib dub/dance in a van. The video quickly spread in popularity and garnered over 10 million views in less than a month.

Throughout the summer of 2012, other collegiate and professional sports teams joined the bandwagon with their own lip dub tributes, including the U.S.A Swimming Team for the 2012 London Summer Olympics.

Audio-Spliced Mash Ups

The song has also inspired a series of audio-spliced mashup tributes, incorporating soundbites of politicians, celebrities and fictional characters among others.

Parodies

Snowclone Captions

The chorus of the song spawned a number of image macros featuring altered captions of the lyrics, using the following snowclone construction: “Hey I Just Met You, And This is Crazy / But I’m Your X, So Y Me Maybe?”

Custom Business Cards

In addition to the image macros, the chorus lyrics has been also adapted into a greeting message on business cards. The very first sighting of a “Call Me Maybe”-themed business card was submitted by Gawker reader Sarah and published on May 21st. The story was syndicated through its affiliate women’s interest blog Jezebel[10] on the next day, drawing further contributions from the readers.

Search Interest

Google Search query volume for “call me maybe” rose significantly in February of 2012, shortly after the first celebrity lip dub was uploaded to YouTube.